Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations eBook

The Hittites had grown at the expense of Mitanni,
but their glory too was of no long duration.
In the days of Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the Oppression,
their power was at its height. From their southern
capital at Kadesh on the Orontes their armies had
gone forth to contend on equal terms with the forces
of the Nile, and after twenty-one years of warfare,
peace was made between the two combatants, neither
side having gained an advantage in the long struggle.
The text of the treaty is engraved on the walls of
Karnak. There we may read how the two rivals
swore henceforth to be friends and allies, how the
existing boundaries of their respective territories
in Syria were to remain unchanged for ever, and how
a general amnesty was to be granted to the political
fugitives on either side. It was only the criminal
to whom the right of asylum in the dominions of the
other was denied.

In the war they had waged with Egypt the Hittite princes
of Kadesh had summoned their vassal allies from the
distant coasts of Asia Minor. Lycians and Dardanians
had come from the far west; and were joined by the
troops of Aram-Naharaim from the east. The extension
of Hittite supremacy to the shores of the AEgean Sea
is testified by the monuments it has left behind.
Hittite inscriptions have been found near Smyrna engraved
on the rocks, as well as the figures of Hittite warriors
guarding the westernmost pass of the ancient road.
The summer residences of the Hittite princes were
on the eastern bank of the Halys. Here the roads
of Asia Minor converged, and here we still see the
sculptured bas-reliefs of a Hittite palace and long
rows of Hittite deities.

The Hittite empire broke up into a multitude of small
principalities. Of these Carchemish, now Jerablus,
on the Euphrates, was perhaps the most important.
It commanded the ford across the river, and the high-road
of commerce from east to west. Its merchants
grew rich, and “the mina of Carchemish”
became a standard of value in the ancient world.
Its capture by Sargon destroyed a rival of Assyrian
trade, and opened the road to the Mediterranean to
the armies of Assyria.

The decay of the Hittite and Mitannian power meant
the revival of the older Aramaean population of the
country. The foreigner was expelled or absorbed;
Syria and Mesopotamia became more and more Semitic.
Aramaean kingdoms arose on all sides, and a feeling
of common kinship and interests arose among them at
the same time. To the north of the Gulf of Antioch,
in the very heart of the Hittite territory, German
excavators have lately found the earliest known monuments
of Aramaean art. The art, as is natural, is based
on that of their Hittite predecessors; even the inscriptions
in the alphabet of Phoenicia are cut in relief like
the older hieroglyphs of the Hittites. But they
prove that the triumph of the Aramaean was complete.
The foreigner and his works were swept away; no trace
has been discovered of a Hittite text, barely even
of a Hittite name. The gods are all Semitic—­Hadad
the Sun-god and Shahr the Moon-god, the Baal of Harran,
and Rekeb-el, “the Chariot of God.”